Spinetti Daniele - Delphi Cookbook: Recipes to Master Delphi for IoT Integrations, Cross-Platform, Mobile and Server-side Development

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First published: September 2014
Second edition: June 2016
Third edition: July 2018

Production reference: 1310718

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ISBN 978-1-78862-130-4

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Daniele Spinetti is a software architect living in Rome. He is an Embarcadero MVP. Delphi/Object Pascal is his favorite tool/programming language, and he is a lead and active member of several projects in the open source community. In his tutoring activities (conferences and training), he likes to talk about innovative topics in software architectures. He's a huge fan of design patterns and TDD.

Daniele Teti is a software architect, trainer, and consultant with over 20 years of experience. He drives the development of the most popular Delphi open source project on GitHubDelphiMVCFramework. He's also a huge fan of design patterns, machine learning, and AI. Daniele is the CEO of BIT Time Professionals, an Italian company specializing in high-level consultancy, training, development, and machine learning systems.

Primo Gabrijeli started coding in Pascal on 8-bit micros in the 1980s, and he never looked back. In the last 20 years, he was mostly programming high-availability server applications used in the broadcasting industry. He's also an avid writer and has written several hundred articles, and he is a frequent speaker at Delphi conferences, where he likes to talk about complicated topics, ranging from memory management to creating custom compilers.

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If you've been a software developer for a long time, you certainly know how useful a conversation can be with a colleague who has already done something similar to what you are doing and can explain it, as they will have faced the same problem. It is not possible to put all the possible situations that a developer can face in a book, but many problems are similar, at least in principle. This is the reason this book is organized as a cookbook: just like a combination of foods can be adapted and modified to be appropriate for different types of dinner, a programming recipe can provide the idea to solve many different problems. This book is an advanced guide that will help Delphi developers get more skilled in their everyday job. The everyday job, and the quality of your deliverables, is what is contributing to the quality of your professional life. If it does not make sense, reinventing the wheel repeatedly, especially when working with a well-established tool, such as Delphi. The focus of the book is to provide readers with comprehensive and detailed examples on how effectively the Delphi software can be designed and written. All the recipes in the book are the result of years of development, training, and consultancy activities in many different fields of IT, from small systems with thousands of installations to large systems commissioned by big companies or by governments. It is not a magic book that will solve all your development problems (if you find it, tell me, please!), but it could be helpful to get a different point of view on a specific problem, or a hint on how to solve problems. Armed with the knowledge of advanced concepts, such as high-order functions and anonymous methods, generics and enumerable, extended RTTI and duck typing, LiveBindings, multi-threading, FireMonkey, mobile development, server-side development, and IoT, you will be pleasantly surprised how quickly and easily you can use Delphi to write high-quality, clean, readable, fast, maintainable, and extensible code. I read too many boring programming books, so I tried to maintain a relaxed and light exposition. A small applicability scenario that describes a situation where a particular technology, approach, or design pattern can be used successfully introduces all the recipes. The recipes are not very complex, because otherwise the book may become thousands of pages long, but also not trivial, because the IT books landscape is already full of simple examples with few direct applicabilities. I tried to do a good tradeoff, and I hope to be able to do it. Every time I start reading a new book, I ask myself,